22 December 2022
The large tinnie cruises the calm waters, charting a course from the boarding jetty, past moored yachts and waterfront mansions that crowd the shoreline of Georges River at Taren Point, on Dharawal country in suburban southern Sydney. A veil of cloud softens the sunlight and a gentle sea breeze keeps this late-December morning's heat in check.
I'm seated at the bow of the boat, which gathers speed after it passes beneath Captain Cook Bridge, where the river widens into Kamay/Botany Bay. In the distance I can see Sydney's CBD skyline and the towering red-and-yellow cranes of Port Botany that look like giant steel giraffes.
From the stern, captain and coxswain Robert Dixon looks across the water through warm brown eyes shielded by sunglasses. The wind ruffles his long-sleeved polo shirt and threatens to rip off the Akubra pulled down over his short black hair.
Dixon knows this area well. An Environmental Officer from Georges Riverkeeper, a catchment management group that coordinates environmental projects on behalf of eight local councils, he's been in charge of the group's long-running monthly shorebird and waterbird survey for the past three years. This is why he's out today with three volunteers. It's currently high tide, ideal for our purposes. As Dixon explains in his deep, gentle voice: “That's when the birds congregate.”
Travelling around the bay over the next hour or so, a pencil dangling from his mouth, Dixon carefully manoeuvres the boat around submerged hazards and reaches over the side to collect rubbish that we pass in the water. At each survey site, he kills the outboard motor and keeps enough distance from the shoreline to avoid disturbance. He records the 18 species of birds we see – pied cormorants, little terns, red knots – on a count sheet secured in a clipboard on his lap. At one site on the bay's southern shore, he's surprised to find only a handful of pied oystercatchers perched on a row of wooden posts protruding from the water. “There were a lot more shorebirds using this area this time last year.”
The site with the most birds is a roughly 350-metre-long squiggle of sand called Towra Spit Island. Of Botany Bay's scant shorebird habitat that's endured since Captain James Cook moored Endeavour here more than 250 years ago, this is the most important: unlike much of the other surviving habitat, it's predator-free and largely undisturbed by human activity. But it is slowly disappearing, prey to changes in wave energy and sediment deposition caused by major development projects throughout the bay.
Hundreds of birds roost on the island; most are annual migrants only recently arrived from very far away – further, in fact, than most of the planes coming in to land at the international airport just north, across the bay.
The birds that have made the most extreme journey to get here are the 200 bar-tailed godwits () – more specifically, , one of six subspecies –drop so they can feed on the crabs, yabbies and worms that live in the few sand and mud flats that remain in the bay. Individuals with streaked greyish-brown non-breeding plumage are camouflaged well against the sand; a long, graceful, upturned bill – pinkish at the base, with a black tip – protrudes from a small, white head.
